Shortcuts: Using Bear For Notes In Things

Posted on March 7, 2018

Shortcuts: Using Bear For Notes In Things

Posted on March 7, 2018

Since starting to use Things as my full time task manager I’ve become a bit obsessed with automating everything. Not only have I been building my own Workflows, I’ve been unearthing other people’s for inspiration. A rich vein of resource has been The Sweet Set Up, and they proposed using one of my favourite note taking apps Bear as a repository for notes related to Things tasks.

They demoed a Workflow for creating a new note in Bear based on a task in Things, and then linking to each app using their inbuilt URL scheme support. As nice as this was, this involved too much tapping for me, so I’ve made one to do it all itself.

Once you downloaded the Workflow, it’s time to put it to work. In Things, copy the task URL to the clipboard using the three dots on the floating bar. Then tap the three dots again and run the Things → Bear → Things workflow from the share sheet.

This will create a new Note in Bear with the same title as the task, copy in the Things URL, then open up Things again for you to paste the Bear Notes URL into the task - Voila.

I’m pretty sure this could be cleaned up a little bit with very minimal work. The only reason this exists is because I stumbled across the post on Reddit and was convinced I could make the process better! Such is the beauty of these two apps and their embracement of rich iOS features, they are a pleasure to work with.